Life & Wisdom Quote by John McGahern

McGahern is naming, with typical dry exactness, the social absence that can feel louder than any presence: a culture where intimacy is assumed, but codes are improvised. For a novelist, “formal manners” aren’t quaint frills; they’re narrative infrastructure. They create predictable friction points - who may speak, how desire is disguised, how insults are delivered with a smile. In a society with an “agreed form,” the smallest breach can detonate a scene. Take away the script and you take away a whole register of readable tension.

The sting is in the distinction he draws: “some people have beautiful manners” yet there’s no shared system. That’s less a compliment than a diagnosis. Courtesy becomes personal talent instead of social contract, leaving everyone to guess the rules in real time. It’s a gift to conversation, maybe, but a headache for fiction, where the writer needs consistent surfaces to press against. Without formalities, character revelation risks turning blunt, expositional, or purely psychological rather than dramatized through ritual.

The Irish context lurking here is mid-century rural life, Catholic authority, tight communities, and a long-standing suspicion of “posh” performance. Anti-formality can be democratic, even tender: people meet without the armor of etiquette. McGahern’s subtext is that this openness has a cost. When manners aren’t codified, power doesn’t disappear; it just becomes harder to see, operating through gossip, silence, and sudden mood shifts. The novelist’s problem is also the nation’s: how do you map a society that denies it has a script while still enforcing one?